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Downunder 2001!
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The morning was not one any of us were looking forward to – Matt Pearce had left on the 30th, and now James and Matt Smith had to leave today to get back to Sydney in time. We decided to say out goodbyes at the Caltex while filling up fuel/ice etc, it was a great time! And while Macca and I had another week of holidays to go, it was still a great time sharing it with others! Jimmy was at Michael Bath’s – we wanted to meet up with Jimmy at least once on the chase so we decided to head to MB’s to meet up with Jimmy, and also grab a peak at the model runs. The sky was looking more promising I thought, there was lots of low level large Cu – at least it meant the cap had decreased considerably! We met up at MB’s and went through the models. The situation was looking very marginal, a broad region of 0 to –1 LIs to our north in SE QLD, through the Downs and the Wide Bay Burnett region. We wondered what to do…was it worth it? It would be a few hours – and on paper it was not looking very good at all, with quite marginal shear to go with the marginal instability. Macca and I discussed it briefly – we both felt that the sky was speaking for itself over the models – additional moisture (thicker moist layer), and that was extending well to the north. There was a southeast change where we were, which can sometimes produce storms just west of the range in these situations. We decided to follow our gut feelings and headed west to Tenterfield, before heading north to Warwick – just over 3 hours away. Just north of Stanthorpe, I thought I spotted a funnel behind the trees, but then lost it again – so I didn’t mention anything. But about two minutes later I saw it again and pointed it out – we quickly stopped and took some video footage of it before it finally dissipated – not bad in such marginal shear! When we arrived at Warwick, we could see a storm developing to the north. We quickly filled up fuel, grabbed a bite to eat and headed north, just north of Allora. A weak storm had developed, but was dumping down dark rainshafts.
Eventually it produced some very impressive rainfeet – quite sure winds would have been severe underneath it! It wasn’t producing much lightning, but we were relatively close so the CGs it was producing were very impressive – nice and ‘fury!’ They were followed by some good booming rumbles of thunder – was quite fun! The storm was moving slowly (to be expected in the weak shear though), and it put up one more updraft and downdraft before finally weakening.
The anvil was really impressive though…crisp with some mammatus too! I was quite impressed by such a small storm to produce some nice structure. We decided to head further north towards Toowoomba, some CJs were developing. At Toowoomba, the cell to our south had all but completely disappeared and the stuff to our north wasn’t looking quite as promising as it was before. That and also to head north towards Crows Nest would mean almost canopy like conditions along the highway. Not quite the ideal storm viewing road unfortunately! We decided to head west a little – towards Dalby. Our plan was to stay at Dalby to give us a shot of storms to the west and southwest later that day (the other option was the coast again, but we were going to see how that went later). But when we got to Oakey the storms to our north had exploded!
Each time a new updraft went up, it smashed through the original anvil and pushed up higher and higher, putting a small backshear up.
And then another updraft would punch through the old and new anvil, putting another anvil up! It was incredible to watch! The structure was absolutely amazing!!!
When we got to Dalby, the storms were still going strong so we decided to head north towards Kingaroy – a treed road, but it was better than nothing! The storms were quite a distance away still, just their size made them appear much closer! The updrafts continued to be quite amazing, however eventually evening came.
We decided to try and find a little lookout in the hope of some nice sunlit storms, and perhaps a lightning show! But the lightning was quite infrequent (unfortunately), but the sunset wasn’t too bad! We found a nice little lookout on a side road that overlooked a small valley which had been cleared for farming.
After sunset and realising there was no lightning we decided to head south towards Dalby and stay there the night. We went on a quick “orange moon” chase when we got to Dalby, before having dinner and calling it a night. Report by Anthony Cornelius & Andrew McDonald |
